Courses at UCSD

Spring ’05

Dean Tullsen is definitely one of the best teachers that I have met here in UCSD. This class was one of those exceptional classes in which you learn a lot of things. I enjoyed this course immensely. We had two exams, paper readings and summaries, and a project. Subhradyuti and me worked on soamthing called “Analysis of and Dynamic Page Remapping Technique to Reduce L2 Misses in an SMT Processor”. As a part of this research topic, I also worked on the SMTSIM package, which is a simulator for SMT processors. You can find the project presentation here.

Another great class which I liked a lot. This class was more focused on simulation methods. There were a lot of interesting things to learn. I worked on Fracture of Brittle Materials. The most interesting part was the implementation – which finally worked and properly simulated the breaking of a glass plate and a bowl. You can view more details here

Winter ’05

I used to think that I am good at Complexity – but maybe years of being out of touch from Computer Theory had changed that. I struggled quite a bit in the beginning of the class, and it took me a while to get used to it again. Finally, I was glad that it was over.

This is one course from which I learned very little – primarily because I had taken a number of Networking courses in my undergraduate college. One interesting thing that this course offered to me was the projects. We had to build an web server in the first part of the project and then we had to evaluate its performance in the second part of the project. I teamed up with Shan Yan and Yanhua Mao, and we delivered three different web servers – one multithreaded Linux web server, one multithreaded windows web server, and one single threaded windows webserver. Also, we did a project on Phoenix Disaster Recovery System and proposed some modifications – which were pretty cool. Even if I did not learn anything from the course per se, the workload was terribly high. Implementation project + research project + paper reading and summary + exam + mini-conference at the end of the quarter = Amin Vahdat is merciless

I continued my pursuit of graphics courses. In this course we learned different techniques to accurately model physical appearance. I worked on Weathering and Rusting. My final images were not as good as I would have liked them to be – but they were not bad either. You can find the project report in PDF format here.

Spring ’04

This was one of the most satisfying courses that I had taken in UCSD. I also won the first prize in the final rendering competition and received a Sony PlayStation II along with two PS2 games, which, given that I am an avid fan of video games, is really cool.

This course was a special topics course taught by my advisor Prof Bill Lin. We studied various interconnection networks. Our final project was an effort towards improvement of the packet mis-sequencing problem in â€˜Load Balanced Birkhoff-von Neumann Switchâ€™. Here is the report (PDF) and the presentation slides (PPT)